Throughout the Bing experience, you can access snippets of information that may satisfy what you're looking for without leading you elsewhere. If you move the cursor to the right of a Bing search result, a summary window opens with excerpts lifted from the underlying site. You can quickly determine whether to navigate to the full site.
When you hover over a video thumbnail with the cursor, it starts playing, though I hit an occasional snag. You don't have to click "play" or go to the video source (YouTube, Hulu, etc.). Clicking a thumbnail lets you watch in a larger window, often without leaving Bing. Hover over an image, and it jumps out in a somewhat larger window.
Another plus: the "quick tabs" that appear down the left side of the results pane to help you refine a search. Enter "Charleston, S.C.," and you can categorize results by hotels, restaurants, real estate, weather, etc.
On Google, you must scroll to the bottom of a page to see "related searches," though you can also summon a side panel, by tapping "show options."
Bing is also dabbling in real-time search. For example, if you search for an influential person and add Twitter to the search, such as "Al Gore Twitter," you'll get a list of their recent tweets.
Here's how Google and Bing handled a few sample queries.
•Cataracts. Listed at the top of a Bing query on this eye condition was a description of cataracts culled from a Mayo Clinic article. Google's top result was a sponsored advertisement from a lens manufacturer called Transitions. Overall, both Google and Bing delivered several excellent listings, many from the same sources. Google reported about 3.3 million results compared with about 2.3 million for Bing.
•Hilton, Paris. An intentionally vague query. Google started with a sponsored listing for Hilton.com, followed by a news result for the socialite. Bing also had a hotel link at the top (for hotelreservations.com). The Hotels by Hilton site came next, followed by the "official" website for Paris Hilton.
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